BY HER BIRTH Niki de Saint-Phalle is a Parisienne, but more significantly, she is a Scorpio. As eighth house of the zodiac, Scorpio is the province of death and renewal. Its planetary lord, Pluto, is King of Hades and Tsar of all the Underworld. Niki believes in astrology because it agrees with her sense of reality. Fundamentally her metaphysics is an acknowledgement of the presence of power and she is curious about any system which divines the manifestations of the intractable. Aside from its poetic overtones, astrology is very flattering; there is a certain grandeur in having the whole cosmos mid-wife to one’s fate. No subtle modesty prompted Niki to reprint her astrologer’s findings in the brochure for her 1962 exhibition at New York’s Iolas Gallery: “You will adorn death with the enchantments of childhood.” Which is, of course, true. Niki ties rubber lizards to doll-babies’ bellies, shoots real .22’s at cans, bottles and bladders filled with paint, keeps pla
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In the 21st article in a series on 20th century artists who shaped Maltese modernism,
Joseph Agius explores the world of
Caesar Attard.
The art of Caesar Attard (b. 1946) is difficult to define due to its complexity and idiosyncratic evolution. Attard investigates the opposites, the dualities; experimentation is an integral part of his game. His art, conceptual, inquisitive and ephemeral, is very much in touch with the general world around him, be it technological breakthroughs, sociopolitical considerations as well as the introspectively personal.
Caesar Attard
Attard, born in Żejtun just after World War II, is the sixth of seven children. He enjoyed a happy but cocooned childhood amid a genuine Catholic rural upbringing and a parental encouragement to pursue his artistic studies; his parents realised that their young son demonstrated a precocious aptitude at drawing. His brothers all found employment at the dockyard and followed in their father’s footsteps. The young Caes